∑ 107
and liminality in which Simpson finds stable ground.
And it gave the new exhibition its title.
Included in ‘Unanswerable’ is a photocollage of a
gussied-up African-American woman with a vivacious,
joyful smile, whose silvery gown melts into an iceberg,
as well as a large-scale sculpture, a snowball cast
in plaster with a pensive African-American woman
perched on top.
Simpson’s collages remix and reimagine a range of
female representation, especially of black American
women. ‘I think the collages will confirm that I’m
crazy!’ she says, erupting again into voracious laughter.
‘They are detached from the content or from the thing
they were supposed to represent,’ she explains, and
by employing archival material, ‘it’s not nostalgia, but
rather an alignment of how similar what we are living
now is to parts of the American past that aren’t that
long ago. A compression of time.’
Simpson’s grand debut at Hauser & Wirth was to be
titled Black & Ice and, indeed, some of the larger works- the biggest 12ft by 8.5ft – feature cyan ink-washed
glaciers and icebergs seemingly adrift in the panel itself,
detached and unexplained. ‘All these natural forces in
peril at the same time,’ Simpson says. ‘To me, it’s not so
much an environmental thing as society, in particular
America, being in peril in countless ways. It’s
overwhelming, but not new. It’s a return to a past.
There’s a lot still going on that’s the same in terms
of racism, bigotry and the whole shebang.’
Regal and approachable, at 58, Simpson appears
ageless, a quality reflected in her work, too. From her
poetic photography of the 1980s – such as Waterbearer
(1986) or Five Day Forecast (1988), black-and-white
faceless portraits of African-American women with
accompanying text-based inscriptions – to her latest
pieces, her works are powerful metonyms of systemic
institutional racism and sexism. They read as vital
and visceral critiques of things as they still are, though
she began producing them 30 years ago.
Simpson is an African-American female artist who
delves into aspects of her personal biography without
making her work explicitly about her. ‘People have
always said to me, “Is that you in the work?”,’ to which
Simpson rolls her eyes. ‘How I create art is really
important for my personal life and how I get through
the world,’ she reveals, but ‘it was a purposeful thing
to leave myself out of the narrative.’
She works in two Brooklyn studios, one designed
by David Adjaye and built in 2009, the other a recently
acquired raw space, with 60ft walls, designed by local
architects Bergen Street Studio. Simpson wanted to
be able to alternate between areas that are ‘completely
rough’ and those that are ‘tricked out’. It’s still the
Adjaye studio that feels like her creative safe place,
though, a space she is ‘very emotionally attached to,’
she says. ‘We were able to create a space that spoke
specifically about her own work process,’ says Adjaye.
Here, Simpson has ‘the feeling of freedom that I can
make whatever I want. And there are so many other
things to worry about than curtailing my imagination.
Without that, life’s quite sad and without joy.’ ∂^
‘Lorna Simpson: Unanswerable’ will be showing at
Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London W1, tel: 44.20 7287
2300, from 1 March until 28 April, hauserwirth.com.
Lorna Simpson Collages, $30 (published by Chronicle Books,
chroniclebooks.com), is available from May‘There’s a lot still going on that’s the same in terms
of racism, bigotry and the whole shebang’
TOP, UNANSWERABLE
(DETAIL), 2018, FOUND
PHOTOGRAPH AND
COLLAGE ON PAPER,
BY LORNA SIMPSON
ABOVE, SIMPSON’S
LIMITED-EDITION DOUBLE
COVER, ADRIFT, FOUND
PHOTOGRAPH AND
COLLAGE ON PAPER
(SEE OTHER COVER, LEFT),
AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS,
SEE WALLPAPER.COMArtworks: © Lorna Simpson, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth